These days, “paraphernalia” is just another word for “stuff”. Look around you; almost no matter where you are you’ll see some paraphernalia. It wasn’t always this way, you know. Not that humans haven’t tended to surround themselves with the flotsam and jetsam of the acquisitive behaviors they inherited from an ancient line of great apes (see the November 24 entry in Book of Days). The detritus you leave simply strewn around your working or living environment wasn’t always called “paraphernalia.” Paraphernalia has always been “stuff,” but it used to be a much more specific type of stuff.
“Paraphernalia” comes from the Greek word “parapherna,” which meant “beside the dowry.” It was the custom for a dowry (a payment of some kind, generally money and/or property) to accompany a bride into her marriage. But there was more; the bride might have her own personal possessions as well. The dowry was given to the groom and considered his property, but the wife retained possession of her own things — and since those things were “beside the dowry”, they were called “parapherna.” Both the custom and the word “parapherna” entered Latin, where the word morphed into “paraphernalia” and migrated unchanged into English.
The marriage laws in England gradually evolved into a structure that’s more familiar to us, and since “paraphernalia” was such a great word, it stayed in common usage. Some time around the 1700s it came to mean “personal possessions” in general; not related to brides, grooms, or marriage. That’s more or less what it means today, although its association with possession has relaxed and generally you can use “paraphernalia” to mean any sort of junk without even considering who (if anyone) might own it.
